Munson: Underground Railroad book details Iowans' silent courage

Dec. 12, 2013

'Necessary Courage: Iowa's Underground Railroad in the Struggle Against Slavery' by retired historian Lowell Soike of Des Moines, is the centerpiece of events today at the State Historical Museum that mark the close of an ambitious 11-year project to document key people and places statewide.

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Museum events

Eleven years of study on Iowa’s role in the Underground Railroad culminate today with events at the State Historical Museum of Iowa, 600 E. Locust St. Admission is free. 2:30 p.m. — Presentation about Underground Railroad sites in Iowa listed on the National Park Service Network to Freedom. 4:30 to 6 p.m. — Charity Nebbe of Iowa Public Radio interviews Doug Jones and Lowell Soike about their grant project and Soike’s new book on Iowa Underground Railroad history. More information: iowahistory.org or 515-281-5111. For more on Lowell Soike’s book, “Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle Against Slavery,” go to uiowapress.org.

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Sometimes it takes too long for the words to sink in.

It was more than 140 years ago when Ret Clarkson, publisher and editor of the Iowa State Register, worried that the true scope of Iowa’s role in the anti-slavery movement and the Underground Railroad would be lost. The bloody Civil War had been fought, the Union preserved — but what about the racial turmoil that led up to it?

The 19th-century journalist warned readers that “every day the various items and incidents of these historic facts is rapidly being forgotten.”

Today offers a sign that Iowa finally has taken Clarkson’s words to heart, even though none of us was alive when he wrote them.

A newly published book, “Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle Against Slavery” by retired historian Lowell Soike of Des Moines, is the centerpiece of events today at the State Historical Museum that mark the close of an ambitious 11-year project to document key people and places statewide.

Clarkson’s warning is included in “Necessary Courage.”

The book’s sweep “shows how Iowa was part of the growing national move towards Civil War, although nobody knew it at the time,” said Soike, a historian with the State Historical Society for 36 years before he retired in 2010.

I first wrote about this Iowa Freedom Trail Project in March when dozens of historians and curious Iowans gathered in Des Moines to discuss it.

Archaeologist Doug Jones is the current project manager who picked up the gauntlet from Soike.

This fall he wrapped the 32-page report, with 182 pages of appendices that feature a county-by-county chronicle of Underground Railroad stories. (The report eventually will be posted at iowahistory.org.)

“It was almost like doing another master’s thesis,” Jones said.

The work was fueled primarily by a $234,327 grant, 80 percent of it federal money.

“We’re starting to see a lot more connections than anticipated,” Jones said of the results.

For more than a decade scholars combed through 5,233 newspaper stories published from 1846 through 1863.

They identified as many as 984 people from the era — including 529 Iowans directly involved in Underground Railroad activities.

Some of the history inevitably was lost in ghost towns long since wiped off the map. Perhaps only a derelict cemetery remains with a trace of an abolitionist’s name carved in weather-beaten stone.

The southern half of Iowa was the focus of Underground Railroad activity, with the bulk of escaped slaves from across the border in Missouri.

As white settlers spread into western Iowa, a slave trail was established through the territory.

Most of Missouri’s slaves were situated in smaller clusters on farms along the Missouri River, Soike said. It wasn’t the same vast plantation culture familiar to the Deep South.

Today, precious few Underground Railroad sites remain.

Others, such as the Benjamin Franklin Pearson House in Keosauqua, are long reputed to have been stations on the trail but await definitive documentation.

Soike’s book details such historical wrinkles as Iowa’s short-lived Liberty Party that opposed slavery in the 1840s before it folded into the Free Soil Party.

Echoing today, Iowa is shown to be a political mix with its waves of settlers from both Southern slave and Northern free states.

I can’t believe that anybody would dismiss any of this as dusty or irrelevant history.

This century, Iowa was on the front lines of electing our nation’s first black president.

Doesn’t it make historical sense to bookend our knowledge — to figure out and how we got here?

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns, blog posts and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/munson. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).